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"History
is just people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 346......October 2024 Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ Communications Corporation, the fuzzy focus
of The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of
new technology on society." If you'd like to receive
email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let us
know. correspo
at swcp dot com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHO’S
DOING THAT? For
many years the Correspo has offered links to videos showing especially interesting
robots in
action. Many of the most interesting clearly weren’t products performing
practical tasks, and we wondered vaguely why anybody would put the energy and
money into developing robot birds, ants, kangaroos and other fascinating critters…one
after another, year after year. The videos of these thing in action…not
just one, but a flock of birds, for example, are professionally made, and often shot in
what seems to be a great big lobby of a building at least four stories high (easy
to mount cameras at different levels) and the robots themselves are artistically
crafted, often beautiful. Only recently did it occur to us to look into the
company, called Festo. They’re family-owned, headquartered in
Esslingen, Germany…the Stuttgart metro area…and they’re a large company, with
more than 20,000 employees and revenue around four billion dollars a
year. They sell automation products to 300.000 customers in several
different industries worldwide, they are big in education as Festo
Didactic, offering training programsin automation…and
they invest 7% of their gross income in research and development. We’ve never
seen their name in connection with anything, but their wonderful
biologically inspired robots are marvelous advertising, as well as being
great experimental exercises. Notice on the company’s website that their
robots aren’t all that’s imaginatively designed. Their architecture is
interesting. ARF! Dogs
interact with machines in different ways One of ours would hide in corners
when we were using the vacuum cleaner, rushing out to bite the bag on
the machine whenever it sensed an opportunity, then rushing back to
hide before the thing could bite her back. Neither of them was injured in
this activity, and it added entertaining challenge to cleaning the carpet. In
2020, a
team at Yale published a report on their study to explore how dogs
interact with robots; do they perceive them as companion critters? will
they respond to commands from them (necessarily via speakers) in the
voices of their human folks? Not surprisingly, the results were mixed,
but fascinating. The pups weren’t very responsive to commands simply
played through speakers. They weren’t much interested in video displays.
They were a bit more responsive to static robots, and more responsive
to social robots that moved and pointed…especially when their human folks
were seen to interact socially with the robots. This wasn’t a huge study,
and the results (which I may have misunderstood) provide just an interesting
start. Because 2020 was a few years ago, we looked online for followup, and there hasn’t been much. That was
early in the covid outbreak, and people were staying home a lot with
their dogs. They worried that the pups would feel lonely and abandoned
when work and other group activity resumed and their folks left them for
extended periods, so there was talk…not a whole lot …of giving them robot
companions to make them feel better. (A work associate in the 1970s knew
that her dog became much excited, and would race wildly through the house
whenever the phone was ringing, so she’d call home a couple of times a day
when she was away to give her pup some exercise.) There’s commercial
activity along these lines four years later, all companies offering
devices that produce signals that cue a dog who has learned what they mean to
interact with the machine. When the dog responds, the machine tosses out one
or more treats as a reward. The prominent guy in the field is John Honchariw, who set up a company called Companion as long ago as 2020 offering
machines that interact with dogs, ostensibly (maybe really) training them. A
second company, PupPod,
offers a “toy” that does the same thing. A third, Ogmen, offers
a more complex and presumably more expensive system. Perhaps there are
others. These things all use cameras, sound, wi-fi, and software to allow
dog owners to be part of the activity from near or far (my associate
could have seen her dog running) and with the advent of powerful AI, all
sorts of automatic activities are possible. Still, we’ve never actually
seen any of these thing, so they’re not yet reaching the mass market. Mr. Honchariw’s company, Companion,
is still online with a dog in its logo but they’re selling business consulting,
with no mention of dog-training-robots, whatever that indicates. It may
seem a trifle cynical to recall that decades ago when an observer
commented to a trainer of animals for the movies, “It must be really tough to
train the turtles,” the guy replied grimly, “If it eats, we can train it.”
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Item: A couple of
years ago the Correspo commented on closely related jackfruit,
breadfruit, and durian as a significant source of human nutrition over the
centuries. Noting my comment that I’d never eaten breadfruit, Steven Sester
sent me three packages of breadfruit snack chips that were slightly more
edible and tasty than cardboard, but did not suggest the rich gastronomic potential
of breadfruit. This
article from Wired brings the subject pretty well
up to date. It’s intriguing to read here about the growth of other
food-producing plants protected from the sun by the broad-leafed breadfruit
trees. Apparently, breadfruit trees flourish in the warm and warmer weather
we’ve been noticing in recent times. Item: When Medellin Drug Cartel Leader Pablo Escobar was
killed in 1993 (gosh, that’s 30+ years, now…feels like yesterday) and his
lavish estates were let go to ruin, a small handful of hippos escaped from a
zoo in one of them. They flourished in the tropical wilds of Colombia, and have
become a serious hazard to people and other wildlife. Authorities set out capture
or kill them, but their
half-hearted efforts have not been effective, and the population is reportedly
still growing. This is rather like the
Burmese Python infestation of the southern swamps in the US. which has
reportedly reduced the populations of other critters like deer sharply. The
snakes are apparently fighting things out with alligators in some areas. It
will be interesting to see what the next ten years bring. Item: This report of extraordinarily high tailwinds moving passenger airliners at well over the speed of sound relative to the ground does not mention the reverse effect of headwinds. One recalls being hastened along in one of the DC-3s we operated up and down the West Coast. The ‘3s typically cruised at ~150 mph, and it was unnerving to see landmarks appearing startlingly soon as we approached them at 220+mph. Conversely, one of our flights, fighting a 100 mph headwind wasn’t reaching its usual radio checkpoints one night, and the crew kept checking with the tower at their next stop. “Do you have us on radar yet?” “No, we don’t see you. Where are you?” “We’re here!” “Nope, don’t see you.” The plane was practically standing still with respect to the ground. When they turned to head back to their last stop before running low on fuel, they got there in record time. Airliners tend to be a little faster these days. _______________________________________________ ITEM
FROM THE PAST This item from 1996 was recalled when Ondine hauled a big, heavy old Underwood office typewriter upstairs recently from the recesses of some downstairs closet. I dug out an old portable typewriter the other day, so I
can type envelopes and such without having to outwit the computer and the
printer. Even found a fresh ribbon for it. Ondine, almost nine, and Skylar,
five, were fascinated by this mechanical device. They ordinarily rise early
and play games, check their e-mail, etc...on their
dad’s computer. They had never seen a mechanical typewriter, and were
astonished to discover the reversed letters on the print levers, to use the
manual carriage return, and see the metal parts bunch up when multiple keys
are struck at once. Who would have thought...? Computers and the internet are wonderful. (One editor, may his canals be filled with sand, rejected an article, sending it back in my stamped-self-addressed-envelope [SASE] with comments on it in ink, so I had to retype it for submission elsewhere.) Hooray for word processors. …but I do sort of miss the ding of the bell at the end of a line and the physical activity of using the lever to swing the carriage back to the right after each line. It was reassuring to sit in my office and bang away on a great big old Olivetti office typewriter. We were sort of a team. No, no…that’s just a fit of nostalgia talking…I wouldn’t go back to it, thank you. A
few companies are still manufacturing mechanical
typewriters, mostly for specific applications…and it’s strange hear
people discussing IBM Selectrics with no carriage- return levers and their golf-ball print heads as old-fashioned systems. What? some of us still think of Selectrics as dazzling
new technology. In the late ‘70s we found what looked like a good deal, and bought portable typewriters for each of our four kids…but it wasn’t a good deal. I hammered
out maybe three million words on my good old 1957 Smith-Corona portable (which must still be hidden somewhere around the house), but I couldn’t do that on those machines, and I don’t think the kids ever used them. Quality counts in the typewriter biz. Wikipedia has a great
article on typewriters, and by all means listen to Leroy Anderson’s wonderful
music The Typewriter. The HP OfficeJet Pro behind me
as I type this seems unlikely to suggest such fun. And see the Wikipedia piece about The
Typewriter. The Underwood pictured there looks just like the one now across the room. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
____________________ Copyright
© 2024 ABQ Communications Corporation. All rights reserved. |
This book was written, richly
illustrated, and published by excellent grandkid, Malia Hill. At 7 (gosh, ten
years ago) she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes… suddenly, of course “Get
her to the hospital NOW!” and things have been nip and tuck since then with
many scary crises She’s taken control of her life…played and sang at Whiskey
A Go